Mary Beth Koszut
Bradley University

Pathway 1
Oil on Panel
24" x 48"

Painting is dichotomous. On one hand, it can make you feel confident and successful for work well done. Yet on the other, it allows you to feel foolish for letting it demand hours of your attention, alone with a surface, trying to achieve this subjective success. To what end? …In hopes of communicating some inner desire, some conceptual something that you cannot quite verbally articulate yourself? And yet you keep painting. You continue spending hours alone; you and your canvas. Why? Perhaps you paint for the visceral feeling of putting that first stroke of paint on a white canvas, for getting lost in time pouring out your emotions and attacking your surface, for a sense of pride in making something beautiful. Painting is work, but it is so much more. Painting is a fusion of concept and emotion, conjoined to its maker, unremoved by a machine, a kiln, or a press. It is just you, your brushes, and your paint. For this direct connection to the medium and for the emotive reasons that speak to our spirit, we simply paint.